2. Suppose for a moment that you are composed of both a
physical body and a non-physical spirit-mind. How might bio-chemical sensory
information in your three-dimensional brain make its way into your
non-three-dimensional spirit mind?

3. Some people think that God is nothing more than the sum
total of the natural world, and all of the laws of nature that the world
contains. Is there anything wrong with this view of God?

4. Suppose that you knew nothing at all about modern
science. Which view of the world would best exemplify God’s creative power: (a)
a world that contains some matter and some empty space, or (b) a world that is
jam packed full of matter with no empty space?

5. Is this the best possible world that God could have
created, or might he have done better if he chose to do so?

Rationalism is the philosophical view that knowledge is
acquired through reason, without the aid of the senses. Mathematical knowledge
is the best example of this since through rational thought alone we can plumb
the depths of numerical relations, construct proofs, and deduce ever more
complex mathematical concepts. We can even envision that someone locked in a
room with no sensory experience whatsoever might still arrive at a
sophisticated level of mathematical knowledge. Several ancient and medieval
writers held to rationalism, most notably Plato and philosophers who followed
in the Platonist tradition. In the mid 17th century, though,
rationalism was given a unique twist by philosophers who held that our most
important mental concepts are innate—or inborn—and from these we deduce other
truths with absolute certainty. Advocates of this position were largely from
the continental European countries of France, the Netherlands, and Germany, hence this new breed of rationalism is often called “Continental Rationalism.” The
main philosophers associated with this movement, which we will explore in this
chapter, are René Descartes, Nicholas Malebranche, Baruch Spinoza,
and Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz.

A. DESCARTES

René Descartes (1596–1650) was born in the
French city of La Haye en Touraine, subsequently renamed “Descartes” in his
honor. At 11 years of age he entered a Jesuit college, and by age
20 earned a law degree according to his father’s wishes.
While this education pleased his father, a high-court judge himself, Descartes
never actually did practice law. Shortly after graduation, he abandoned all
study, and disregarded his own conviction that military life was idle and cruel
and became a military engineer for the purpose of traveling, seeing the world
and discovering truth found in himself or else in “the great book of the
world,” as he said. He sold all of his possessions and invested the
funds, along with money from an inheritance and from patrons, which allowed him
the privilege and freedom to travel and study most of his life. Specific
direction for this came during his time in Europe when on three occasions
Descartes dreamed of becoming a scientist and philosopher. At that point, he
followed his dreams—literally. His most fruitful time as an author was during
his 20 year residence in the Dutch Republic where routinely stayed in bed
writing until around noon. While he valued his privacy, and regularly changed
residences to protect it, he nevertheless gained international fame through his
writings. He became as renown in science and mathematics as he was in
philosophy, and his publications reflect this diversity. Descartes never
married, although he fathered children and rationalized that, after all, he had
never taken a vow of chastity. Invited to become teacher to the 22-year-old
Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes’ daily routine was dramatically altered and
he rose at 5:00 a.m. to instruct the demanding queen in philosophy. In
addition, she ordered him to write a ballet in verse. When he died of pneumonia
one year later at age 53, it was speculated that this pressure and inconvenient
schedule was the underlying cause. Alternatively, some suspected that he
contracted the disease while nursing a French ambassador with pneumonia back to
health.

Methods of Investigation

Like other thinkers of the time, Descartes was attracted to
the notion of a scientific method of investigation, which when followed would
enable him to make new discoveries and push the boundaries of knowledge. Thus he
devised his own method, the starting point of which is to eliminate all former
opinions and establish knowledge afresh only on solid foundations. According to
Descartes, the knowledge that we typically attain through education and life
experience is an unsystematic mixture of truths and falsehoods, and it is often
impossible for us to easily distinguish between the two. It is similar to the
disorganization and poor layout that we see in old cities as they slowly expand
from small villages to large urban areas, randomly adding one neighborhood
after another. While we might try to improve the matter by inspecting our
knowledge-base one fact at a time, this, he argues, will not do, and the only
trustworthy way to proceed is to brush it all aside and start again. Similarly,
the most organized cities are planned by a single architect from ground up, and
this is the model that we should follow when expanding our knowledge.

Thus, Descartes says, we should being by clearing
away our old and disordered schemes of knowledge. After that, we should follow four
specific rules of inquiry that will enable us to methodically build a coherent system.
Rule 1 is to accept only indubitable, clear and distinct ideas. He describes
here his own experience when applying this rule:

The first of these was to accept
nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so; that is to say,
carefully to avoid precipitation and prejudice in judgments, and to accept in
them nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly
that I could have no occasion to doubt it. [Discourse on the Method]

His point is that the foundation of his knowledge should be
only facts that he knows with certainty and which he can recognize as such
because of the clarity and distinctness that they display. Rule 2 is that, when
trying to solve problems, he would “divide up each of the difficulties which I
examined into as many parts as possible, and as seemed requisite in order that
it might be resolved in the best manner possible” (ibid). Once the problem is
broken down into smaller units, he proceeds with rule three that he should begin
with the simplest objects, and work to the harder and more complex ones.
Finally, Rule 4 is to review: “to make enumerations so complete and reviews so
general that I should be certain of having omitted nothing” (ibid).

Descartes recognized that if he actually began
by rejecting all of his previous views, he would be temporarily entering a no
man’s land in which he could believe or trust nothing until his final system of
knowledge was well underway. During that time, though, how should he behave? Should
he become an atheist, a drug peddler, or bank robber? To address this concern he
established a provisional code of morals that he would follow, which would hopefully
keep in on the right track until he completed his system of knowledge. First,
he would obey the laws of his country and adhere to his faith in God. Second,
he would be consistent in following positions, even if they seemed doubtful.
Third, he would focus on changing his desires rather than attempting to change
the world because of his desires. Finally, he would choose the best occupation
he could, which he determined to be that of a philosopher.

Systematic Doubt

Once establishing his method of investigation, Descartes
proceeds to build a system of knowledge that he can trust with absolute
certainty. The first step is for him to clear away the unreliable clutter of
his previous belief system. To that end he uses a systematic doubting process
that would plow away any previous belief he held that was the slightest bit
questionable. He writes,

It is now some years since I
detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth
admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on
this basis. And from that time I was convinced that I must once for all
seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly
accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to
establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences. [Meditation
1]

The type of doubt that Descartes describes here is not a
common sense doubt, but, instead, an exaggerated systematic doubt. For example,
common sense tells me that I should doubt reports that creatures have visited
earth from other planets, or that a house is haunted, or that some people can
see into the future. Descartes, though, wants to move well beyond this kind of
doubt and question things that are even commonsensical. My common sense tells me
that the ball in front of me is red, but what if I’m colorblind? It’s unlikely,
but as long as there is some reason to doubt it, I should. Thus, his rule of
thumb at this stage is that if it can be doubted, it should be doubted. The
point of this exaggerated doubt is that, once we clear away everything that’s
the slightest bit questionable, we’ll only be left with truths that are
certain.

As he casts his doubtful eye on questionable
beliefs from his past, he realizes that it would be impossible to inspect each
of them one at a time; there are just too many. Rather, it is more efficient to
submit to inspection the underlying foundation of the bulk of his beliefs. He
writes,

Now for this object it is not
necessary that I should show that all of these are false -- I will perhaps
never arrive at this end. But inasmuch as reason already persuades me that I
ought no less carefully to withhold my assent from matters which are not
entirely certain and indubitable than from those which appear to me evidently
to be false, if I am able to find in each one some reason to doubt, this will
suffice to justify my rejecting the whole. And for that end it will not be
requisite that I should examine each in particular, which would be an endless
undertaking; for owing to the fact that the destruction of the foundations of
necessity brings with it the downfall of the rest of the edifice, I will only
in the first place attack those principles upon which all my former opinions
rested. [Ibid]

And what is the underlying foundation of most of his
beliefs? It is the senses: “all that up to the present time I have accepted as
most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the
senses” (ibid). As skeptics since ancient Greece have noted, there are many
reasons to question the reliability of the senses. For example, we regularly
experience sensory illusions, such as when things at a distance appear much
smaller than they really are. While this is a problem, Descartes argues that it
is not a very big obstacle, since we can get used to sensory illusions and
trust our senses for more important things. Skeptics of the past have also
suggested that the reliability of my senses is undermined when I consider the
possibility of whether or not I’m dreaming. I look at the ball in front of me
and my senses tell me that it exists. But, if I’m dreaming, then this
experience is completely unreliable. It doesn’t make any difference if it
really feels to me like I’m awake, since many times I’ve had dreams in which I
was convinced I was actually awake. Descartes agrees that this too goes a long
way in undermining the reliability of our senses, but not completely. For
example, it allows me to doubt whether the ball in front of me actually exists,
but it does not entitle me to doubt whether the three-dimensional world itself
actually exists. To have even a dream-like perception of a round ball, according
to Descartes, there must at least be a three-dimensional world which is the
source of my dreams about three-dimensional shapes.

Descartes then pushes the doubting process one
step further, and this is his claim to originality: what if God, or some evil
genius, is deceiving me about everything, including the existence of the
three-dimensional world? Perhaps everything that goes on in my mind is the
result of a divinely-implanted hallucination. That would cast doubt on
virtually every belief I have, including whether I even have a body:

I have long had fixed in my mind
the belief that an all-powerful God existed by whom I have been created such as
I am. But how do I know that he has not brought it to pass that there is no
earth, no heaven, no extended body, no magnitude, no place, and that
nevertheless they seem to me to exist just exactly as I now see them? And,
besides, as I sometimes imagine that others deceive themselves in the things
which they think they know best, how do I know that I am not deceived every
time that I add two and three, or count the sides of a square, or judge of
things yet simpler, if anything simpler can be imagined? . . . I will then
suppose, not that God who is supremely good and the fountain of truth, but some
evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, has employed his whole energies
in deceiving me. I will consider that the heavens, the earth, colors, figures,
sound, and all other external things are nothing but the illusions and dreams
of which this genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my gullibility.
I will consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any
senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things. [Meditation
1]

Not only does the evil genius hypothesis cast doubt on the
very existence of the three-dimensional world, but it also calls into question
the confidence I have in my ability to do mathematics. Thus, when I consider
that 1+1=2, perhaps the evil genius is just making me think that it’s true when
it in fact isn’t.

The One Foundation of All Knowledge

It’s important to emphasize that Descartes himself was not a
skeptic, but just used this powerful skeptical doubting device as a means of
clearing away his older and more insecure beliefs. With those out of the way, he
goes on to discover some firm belief which even the evil genius can’t make him
doubt. All it takes is one truth, he argues, and that then can serve as the
foundation for building an elaborate system of knowledge. As the ancient Greek
mathematician Archimedes once said, “Give me a fulcrum and a lever and a firm place
to stand, and I alone can move the world.” Indeed, Descartes finds one such
belief that even an evil genius cannot make him doubt: the truth that he
exists. He writes,

[Suppose that] there is some
deceiver or other, very powerful and very cunning, who ever employs his
ingenuity in deceiving me. Then without doubt I exist also if he deceives me,
and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing
so long as I think that I am something. So that after having reflected well and
carefully examined all things, we must come to the definite conclusion that
this proposition: I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce
it, or that I mentally conceive it. [Meditation 2]

Descartes’ reasoning here is that in order for him to be
deceived by the evil genius, he must exist to begin with; this is the same
argument that Augustine offered centuries earlier when attempting to show that
there is at least one truth that we can be absolutely certain of. In one of his
publications Descartes expresses this idea with the phrase “I think, therefore
I am” (in Latin, cogito ergo sum). Later on, though, he rejected this
expression since it sounded like he was drawing a logical conclusion—and this
is a problem since an evil genius might be deceiving him about the reliability
of logic. Rather than being a logical inference, the truth of his existence is
something that he can immediately grasp “by a simple
act of mental vision” (ibid, “Replies to Objections”).

This is exactly the foundation Descartes thinks
he needs upon which to build his system of knowledge. How he proceeds in his
building project is somewhat complex, but his basic strategy is to shoot down
the evil genius hypothesis, then show that he can have complete confidence in a
special truth-detecting mental ability that God has given him. Briefly, here
are the steps that he goes through.

The first step is to deduce some details about
exactly what kind of thing he is. He still can’t say that he has a body, since at
this stage the possibility still remains that the evil genius is deceiving him
about the three-dimensional world. However, in the very act of grasping his
existence, he is exercising several mental abilities, which he describes here:

But what then am I? A thing which
thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands,
conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.
Certainly it is no small matter if all these things pertain to my nature. But
why should they not so pertain? Am I not that being who now doubts nearly
everything, who nevertheless understands certain things, who affirms that one
only is true, who denies all the others, who desires to know more, is averse
from being deceived, who imagines many things, sometimes indeed despite his
will, and who perceives many likewise, as by the intervention of the bodily
organs? [Meditations 2]

Thus, he concludes that he is primarily a thing that thinks,
and this includes the mental acts of doubting, understanding, conceiving,
affirming, denying, willing, refusing, imagining, and feeling.

The second step is to prove God’s existence. Medieval
philosophers offered a wealth of arguments for God, but most of these assumed
that the three-dimensional world exists and, again, Descartes is not yet in a
position to assume this. All that he knows for sure so far is his own existence
and the kind of mental abilities that he has. However, he devises a different
strategy for proving God that doesn’t require believing in the
three-dimensional world. As he surveys the contents of his mind, he finds the
usual collection of ideas, such as those of trees, animals, buildings. All of
these are finite in nature, and are not particularly reliable. But then he
sees within his mind a concept of “infinite perfection”—an idea infinite
complexity and goodness. It’s like a gleaming diamond sitting among a pile of
dirty rocks. How did that idea get there? He couldn’t have created it himself,
he argues, since his limited mental abilities would be incapable of inventing
an idea that is so infinitely elaborate. The only possible explanation is that the
idea of infinite perfection was implanted in his mind by God himself, who is
infinitely perfect. God, then, must exists. Once he knows that God exists, he
proceeds to the third step, which is to debunk the evil genius hypothesis. His
argument here is straightforward: God could not be a deceiver since deception
is an imperfection, and God is infinite perfection.

The fourth step is to prove that he can have
confidence in a special truth-detecting mental ability that God has given him. According
to Descartes, whenever we encounter obvious truths such as 2+2=4, something
like a light bulb goes off in our heads to alert us that we’re on the right
track. This “light of nature,” as he calls, it involves clarity and
distinctness: we see clearly and distinctly that 2+2=4. The key question is
whether Descartes can trust this truth-detecting light bulb as an accurate
indicator of truth. If there’s an evil genius, then it’s not reliable, since
the evil genius might be hot wiring it to go off at the wrong time. However,
having proven that God is not a deceiver, Descartes can have full confidence
that God created him with a reliable clarity and distinctness mechanism. The
end result is that every time Descartes examines a new truth and the light goes
on, he can add this to his ever-growing edifice of secure knowledge. Armed with
the truth-detecting mechanism of clarity and distinctness, Descartes goes on to
prove the existence of the three-dimensional world. That is, he perceives
clearly and distinctly that his normal perceptions of rocks and trees are
caused by actual three-dimensional external objects, rather than the result of
his imagination or a hallucination.

Spirit-Body Dualism

Once Descartes knows that a three-dimensional physical world
exists, he continues by arguing that human beings are constructed of both a physical
body and a spirit-mind—a position called spirit-body dualism. Philosophers
since ancient times, such as Plato and Plotinus, advocated spirit-body dualism,
and, so, as a general theory, Descartes is suggesting nothing new. What is
unique to Descartes’ position, though, is how he defends this theory, as we see
here:

I concluded that I was a substance
whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may
exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing. Thus the “I”
(that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am) is wholly dis­tinct from the
body. It is even more easily known than the [body], and is such that even if
the [body] did not exist, [my mind] would still continue to be all that it is.
[Discourse on the Method]

His point is that he can conceive of himself existing as a
thinking thing, even if he had no body and there was no three-dimensional
world—sort of like if he was just a spirit-mind bobbing around in the spirit
realm. Thinking, he concludes, is an exclusive attribute of a non-physical
spirit entity. Non-three-dimensional spirit things think, and three-dimensional
physical things do not think. While we do have physical bodies, our thinking
does not occur in our bodies, but only in the spirit part of us.

Thus, according to Descartes, I am composed of a
spirit-mind that thinks, and a physical body that is essentially an unconscious
machine. However, the two interact with each other. When my physical body picks
up sensory information, such as a bee landing on my arm, this data mechanically
flows through my nerves, into my brain, and ultimately is detected by my
conscious spirit. Also, when I think of performing some bodily movement, such
as swatting the bee off my arm, the thought within my spirit-mind triggers a
physical reaction in my brain that mechanically causes my hand to move.

Where precisely in my brain does data transfer
back and forth between my physical body and spirit-mind? According to
Descartes, it occurs in the pineal gland. All the wiring in my brain, he
argues, feeds to that single point right in the center of my brain:

It is merely the most inward of all
its parts, namely, a certain very small gland which is situated in the middle
of its substance and so suspended above the duct whereby the animal spirits in
its anterior cavities have communication with those in the posterior. It is
such that the slightest movements which take place in it may alter very greatly
the course of these spirits. And, reciprocally, the smallest changes which
occur in the course of the spirits may do much to change the movements of this
gland. [The Passions of the Soul, 1:31]

The pineal gland, then, is the master switchboard that
conveys information back and forth between my physical body and spirit-mind.
From Descartes’ perspective, it seemed reasonable to hypothesize that the
pineal gland performed this task since it is so conveniently situated in the middle
of the brain. However, we now know that the pineal gland does not serve this
function, and, in fact, no part of the brain mediates the flow of all conscious
mental activity. Explaining precisely how spirit-minds and physical bodies
interact with each other is a serious challenge for spirit-body dualists, and
several rationalist philosophers after Descartes offered their own solutions,
as we will see.

B. MALEBRANCHE

Descartes was so influential that after his death many
philosophers and scientists adopted and refined his basic views. Among these
“Cartesians”, as they were called, was French philosopher Nicholas Malebranche
(1638–1715), who was especially interested in solving the problem of how
physical bodies and spirit-minds interact. Son of a royal secretary, Malebranche
was born in Paris with a malformed spine, which caused him pain throughout his
life. He was kept home until age 16, later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and was ordained into the Catholic church at around age 25. Around the same time he
first became acquainted with a work by Descartes, which upon reading gave him
heart palpitations and forced him to set it aside for a bit. In his mid-30s he
composed his most famous work, The Search After Truth (1674-75), which
aimed to combine key elements of Augustine’s and Descartes’ philosophy. Gaining
prominence through a succession of publications, he became embroiled in a
bitter dispute with a famous critic over some of the more controversial aspects
of his views. This ultimately led to his Search being placed on the
index of prohibited books. Nevertheless, he continued writing and revising his Search
up to his death at age 77.

Much of Malebranche’s philosophy is driven by
the problem with spirit-body dualism noted above. The central issue is that our
minds are non-three-dimensional spirit, and our bodies are three-dimensional
matter; it is an exceedingly difficult task to move information from one realm
to the other. Descartes believed that his pineal gland theory solved the
problem. Malebranche, though, offers a radically different solution: God
performs the task by shuttling information back and forth between our spirit-minds
and physical bodies. His theory comes in two parts: God giving our minds
sensory information, and God initiating bodily movement.

Sensory Information: Viewing through God

Consider first the problem of how sensory information gets
from my physical body into my spirit-mind. Again, imagine that a bee lands on
my arm; somehow that sensory information moves from my arm, to my brain, and
then jumps into my spirit-mind in the non-physical realm. In fact, according to
Malebranche, it requires a virtual miracle to jump realms. All the sensory
information in my body and brain is three-dimensional; for me to perceive it in
my non-physical spirit-mind, it must get converted into a non-three-dimensional
form. He explains the difficulty of this conversion process here, speculating
about what it would take to turn a physical stone into a non-physical angel:

It is even more difficult to produce an angel [that is made of
spirit] out of a [physical] stone, than to produce the angel out of nothing.
This is because to make an angel out of a stone (so far as it can be done) the
stone must be annihilated, and afterwards the angel created. But simply to
create an angel, nothing is to be annihilated. If therefore the mind produces
its ideas from the material impressions which the brain receives from objects,
it must always do the same thing, or a thing as difficult, or even more
difficult than if it created them. Since ideas are spiritual, they cannot be
produced of material images, which have no proportion with them. [Search
After Truth, 3.2.3]

Thus, the gulf between physical sensory information in our
bodies and conscious experience of that information in our spirit-minds is so
enormous, that only God can convert the one to the other.

How exactly does God convert information in our
physical bodies to our spirit-minds? There are two steps to this divine
process. First, God has within his own mind a master database of all possible
perceptions that anyone in the world will ever experience, and all of this data
is in non-three-dimensional form. For example, within this database there is
the complete range of perceptual experiences that someone might have of Paris in the year 1700, or in the year 2000, or for that matter in the year 3000. It
contains the complete range of perceptual experiences of city parks,
underground caves, music concerts, prison cells, basements, closets, you name
it: God has stored the perceptual information of all of those experiences.
Second, at the appropriate time, God feeds the appropriate spirit-mental images
into our spirit-minds. For example, if a bee is landing on my physical arm
right now, God will inject into my spirit-mind the appropriate visual and
tactile sensation of the bee. Malebranche describes this process here:

It is absolutely necessary that God
should have in himself the ideas of all the beings he has created, since
otherwise he could not have produced them. And, thus, he sees all those beings
by considering the perfections which he includes in himself, and to which all
beings are related. Moreover, it is necessary to know that God is very strictly
united to our souls by his presence, so that we may say that he is the location
of spirits, just as space is the location of bodies. These two things being
supposed, it is certain that the mind may see what there is in God, which
represents created beings, since that is very spiritual, very intelligible, and
most present to the mind. Thus the mind may see in God the works of God,
supposing God be willing to disclose to our minds what there is in God which
represents those works. [Search after Truth, 3.2.6]

According to the above, for God to have created everything
in the world, he needed to first have a complete understanding of those things—when
a specific tree will grow on a given plot of land, when someone will chop it
down, and when someone will carve it into a wooden chair. All of this
information is stored in God’s database of possible perceptions. Not only does
God use this as a blueprint for creating the world, he also feeds information
from this database into our spirit-minds when the time is just right.

Bodily Movement: God causing all Physical Motion

The second part of Malebranche’s theory involves how God
gets data from our minds in the spirit realm and converts that into motion in
our physical bodies. Again, suppose that I want to get the bee off my arm by
swatting it with my hand. My spirit-mind issues a command, for example, “raise my
right hand”; God then detects this command in my mind, and activates a sequence
of movements in my physical body, such as chemical activity in my brain and
nerves, which lead to muscle contractions in my right hand. He writes,

It appears most certain to me that the will of spirits is not
capable of moving the smallest body in the world. For it is evident there is no
necessary connection between the will we have of moving our arms, and the
motion of them. It is true, they are moved when we please, and by that means we
are the natural cause of their motion. But natural causes are not true causes;
they are only occasional ones, which act merely through the power and efficacy
of God, as I have already explained. [Search after Truth, 6.2.3]

God, then, is the true cause of the motion in our
bodies, while the physical activity itself is just the occasional or
incidental cause. Accordingly, this aspect of Malebranche’s theory is called
“occasionalism.”

Thus, God plays a decisive role in reading my
thoughts and triggering the appropriate physical activity in my brain. However,
according to Malebranche, God’s role in causal activity goes far beyond this. Every
causal movement in the physical world is activated by God; we can call this
stronger view “extreme occasionalism.” The simple reason for this more extreme
view is that, according to Malebranche, all physical things are inert and
completely incapable of moving themselves: “It is evident that all bodies, both great and small, have no power
of moving themselves: a mountain, a house, a stone, a grain of sand” (ibid, 6.2.3).
An infinite spirit, on the other hand, is capable of moving itself. Thus, if a
physical thing is in motion, the cause of its motion must be some spirit which
has that power—and God is the only spirit that does have it. He writes,

We have only two sorts of ideas, that of bodies, and that of
spirits. Since we ought to speak only of those things which we conceive, we
should reason according to these two ideas. Since therefore the idea we have of
all bodies shows us that they cannot move themselves, it must be concluded that
they are moved by spirits only. But when we examine the idea we have of all
finite minds, we do not see the necessary connection between their wills and
the motion of any body whatever it may be. On the contrary, we see that there
is none, nor can there be any. From this we ought to conclude (if we will argue
according to our knowledge) that as no body is able to move itself, so there is
no created spirit that can be the true or principal cause of the motion of any
body whatever. [Ibid]

More
formally, the argument that Malebranche offers is this:

1. Only physical bodies and spirits
exist.

2. Physical bodies cannot causally
move things themselves.

3. Therefore, only spirits can
causally move things.

4. Finite spirit-minds cannot
causally move things.

5. God, who is infinitely perfect,
can causally move things.

6. Therefore, only God can causally
move things.

Thus,
for whatever motion takes place in the world, God is the only being with the
power to produce it and, accordingly, he is the true active cause of all
motion, in spite of how things might initially appear.

God and Evil

A final influential component of Malebranche’s philosophy is
his explanation of the problem of evil, that is, why an all good God would
create a world with such imperfection and suffering. The world as it currently
stands is far from perfect, and its imperfections have resulted in untold human
misery. The suffering that we experience has two main sources: human-made
causes and natural causes. According to Malebranche human-made suffering, such
as crime and war, is solely the result of human free choice, and we have no one
to blame for that but ourselves. He writes,

[God has not made] the disorder which
has crept into it through the bad use we make of our freedom, for God has made
no infidels. He only permits men to search after him. I understand this, though
I do not know the reason for it. [Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion,
9.9]

The more serious problem concerns the naturally caused
suffering that we experience, such as natural disasters, diseases, and physical
deformities. This is solely the work of God and seems inconsistent with his
goodness. How can we explain why God “who today covers the whole country with
flowers and fruit, will ravage it tomorrow with frost and hail?” (ibid).

Malebranche’s answer is that naturally caused
suffering is a byproduct of God’s efforts to create the most perfect world,
using the fewest number of general laws required. There are two parts to his
point. First, God’s attribute of wisdom inclines him to act in the most
efficient way possible: “he cannot act uselessly” (ibid, 10). Given the kind of
being God is, God has no choice but to act efficiently; thus, his guiding rule
when creating things is to act with the greatest amount of simplicity and
fruitfulness. To that end, God has fashioned a specific number of general laws
of nature, which guide all natural events. Except for the occasional miracle
that overrides the general laws, God sticks to this plan. The second part of
Malebranche’s point is that the natural world, as it currently is, strikes the
right balance between the simplicity of its general laws and the perfection in
its operations. Sure, God could have made the natural world with fewer defects,
but that would have required adding more and more natural laws, thus
diminishing its simplicity:

If the defects of the universe,
wherein we dwell, diminish this relation, the simplicity, fruitfulness and
wisdom of its ways and laws which God follows increase it all the more. A world
more perfect, but produced in ways less fruitful and less simple, would not
bear to the same extent as ours the character of the divine attributes. This is
why the world is full of infidels, monstrosities, disorder of all kinds. [Ibid,
9.11]

Thus, according to Malebranche, we must recognize that no
one but God is responsible for the imperfections in the natural world that
result in human suffering. At the same time, though, we must recognize that,
even with its imperfections, the current world best reflects God’s grandeur
insofar as it reflects God’s need to design things in the most efficient way.

C. SPINOZA

Another philosopher strongly influenced by Descartes is Baruch
Spinoza (1632–1677). Born in Amsterdam of Portuguese Jewish parents, Spinoza
was raised in the orthodox faith which included intense study of the Jewish Talmud.
By the young age of 24, his critical nature came into conflict with Jewish
beliefs. Unable to stop his expounding on these, and fearful that it would
compound the fact that the Jews were not considered Amsterdam citizens at that
time, the Synagogue authorities took the ultimate step and issued a
condemnation of him such that his teaching should not be listened to, and no
one was to be in contact with him. Ironically, at this point, he adapted the
Latin form of his first name, Benedictus, meaning blessed. His parents having
both died, Spinoza passed on his share of the family fortune to his brother and
stepsister, refused prestigious teaching positions and developed a career as a
lens-grinder, making quality optical and magnifying lenses. For additional
income, he sold stolen jewelry smuggled into Holland from France. After becoming entrenched in philosophy, Spinoza’s goal was to establish a
clandestine philosophical sect and change the world. On publishing the Theologico-Politcal
Treatise anonymously and finding it badly received, he was unable to
publish any more of his works, but continued to write nonetheless. In time,
inhaling glass dust from lens grinding led to consumption and ultimately his
death. After this, by Spinoza’s own instructions, his friends collected his
writings, edited them secretly, and quietly submitted them for publication, all
the while cautious lest they be confiscated and destroyed. The plan succeeded,
and the most important of these works is his Ethics, which he completed
two years before his death.

The full title of Spinoza’s Ethics is
“Ethics Demonstrated in a Geometrical Manner,” which signals from the start
that the work’s methodology and writing style are unconventional. Spinoza
believed that geometry offered the best approach to systematically proving
things, insofar as it begins with basic definitions and axioms, then deduces more
complex propositions from these. This is precisely the system that he uses in
his Ethics, which on the whole makes the work feel more like a mathematics
text than a philosophical treatise. Beneath the mathematical exterior, though,
is an innovative theory about God, the cosmos, and human nature.

God as Nature: Substance Monism

In a nutshell, Spinoza holds the pantheistic view that God
is identical to nature as a whole, and human beings are just little pieces of
God. While pantheism is a hallmark of Eastern philosophy, it is a view of God
that has largely been rejected by Western philosophers, two notable exceptions
being the ancient Greek philosophers Parmenides and Plotinus. The traditional
monotheistic conception of God is that he is an all powerful being that created
the universe, but stands apart from everything he creates: the universe is not
a piece of God himself. This traditional monotheistic position—sometimes called
the transcendent view of God—is completely at odds with the pantheistic
position that the entire universe is God. This is what Spinoza holds, and it is
this aspect of his philosophy that got him into so much trouble with his Jewish
community. To understand God, according to Spinoza, we must look to nature
itself and attempt to understand it. The first philosophical task that he sets
out for himself in the Ethics is to prove the pantheistic position that
God is the totality of the natural world, or, using his terminology, “Besides
God, no substance can be granted or conceived” (Ethics, 1.14). The
specific argument that he offers for his position is this:

1. There cannot
exist in the universe two or more substances having the same nature or
attribute. (Proposition 5)

2. God (defined
as a substance consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses
eternal and infinite essentiality) necessarily exists. (Proposition 11)

3. Therefore,
besides God, no substance can be granted or conceived. (Proposition 14)

Even for experienced philosophers the above argument is a challenge
to grasp, but its key point is in the first premise: two substances cannot
share the same attribute. That is, whatever attributes might exist, each one
can only belong to one thing at a time. As an analogy, consider that the
quality of being “The President of the United States” can only belong to one
person at a time, and cannot be shared by two people. So too with the major
attributes that we find in nature: they can only belong to one thing at a time.
Premise 2 tells us that, by definition, God’s nature consists of every major
attribute, and thus there are no such attributes left for other possible things.
Since a thing can't
exist if it doesn't have any attributes, then God is the only thing that exists.
The upshot of the above argument, then, is that nothing in the universe
exists apart from God, and everything that we see in the natural world is
indeed part of God. Thus Spinoza writes “God is one, that is, only one
substance can be granted in the universe, and that substance is absolutely
infinite” (ibid, 1.14). The specific pantheistic position he is advocating here
is sometimes called “substance monism”—that is, there is only one substance
that exists.

Once proving that God is identical to nature as
a whole, the next step is to explain precisely what God’s features consist of. Traditional
monotheists would say that God’s principal attributes are supreme power, supreme
knowledge and supreme goodness. Spinoza, though, does not go this route. First,
according to Spinoza, God has an infinite number of major attributes, but
humans can only conceive of two: consciousness and three-dimensionality. That
is, God has a huge spirit-soul and a huge physical body, which are superimposed
on each other. Second, God’s attributes take on different mini-features—or
“modes” as he calls them—such as the forms of rocks, trees, and people. These
things are all just special arrangements of three-dimensional stuff within God,
or, in the case of humans, three-dimensional stuff plus consciousness. To help
illustrate the distinction within God between major attributes and
mini-features (“modes”), let’s consider the main attributes and mini-features
of a green candy gummy bear. It has two major attributes: it is made of gooey
stuff that gives it shape, and it is green, which gives it color. Aside from
these two major attributes, it has several mini-features. Most noticeably, some
of the gooey stuff is in the shape of a nose, or an ear, or an arm, or a leg.
Think, then, of God and the universe as though it was a giant green gummy bear.
It has two major attributes: greenness (consciousness) and gooey stuff
(three-dimensionality). Further, it has several mini-features, such as an ear
or a nose (rocks, trees, people), which are different arrangements of the two
major attributes of greenness and gooey stuff (consciousness and
three-dimensionality). Thus, everything that we see in the natural world is
some type of mini-feature of God—me, you, the Empire State Building, Mount Everest. For Spinoza, “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can
be, or be conceived” (ibid, 1.15).

Spinoza’s view of God’s two major attributes
provides a convenient solution to the spirit-body problem initially raised by
Descartes. Recall again the central problem: our minds are
non-three-dimensional spirit, and our bodies are three-dimensional matter; it
requires a virtual miracle to move information from one realm to the other.
Spinoza’s solution is a theory that today we call parallelism: consciousness
and three-dimensionality are part of the same divine substance, so spirit-minds
and physical bodies automatically operate in parallel with each other. He
writes,

Whatsoever can be perceived by the
infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance, belongs altogether
only to one substance: consequently, substance thinking and substance extended
are one and the same substance, comprehended now through one attribute, now
through the other. So also, a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are
one and the same thing, though expressed in two ways. [Ibid,
2.7]

Human beings are mini-features of God, and exemplify God’s
two attributes of consciousness and three-dimensionality. As little pieces of
God, our minds and bodies perform in perfect synchronization with each other,
just as God’s major attributes of consciousness and three-dimensionality are
perfectly coordinated with each other. So, when a bee lands on my arm and
initiates a flow of sensory data in my three-dimensional body, my conscious
mind automatically perceives the bee. My mind and my body are thus
automatically synchronized, since God’s major attributes of consciousness and
three-dimensionality are already synchronized:

Mind and body are one and the same
thing, conceived first under the attribute of thought, secondly, under the
attribute of extension. Thus it follows that the order or concatenation of
things is identical, whether nature be conceived under the one attribute or the
other; consequently the order of states of activity and passivity in our body
is simultaneous in nature with the order of states of activity and passivity in
the mind. [Ibid, 3.2]

The information doesn’t need to jump from the physical realm
to the spirit realm, as Descartes supposed. Rather, my body and mind are
operating on parallel paths that are unified in God’s single substance.

Determinism and Human Bondage

At first glance we might think that Spinoza’s view of “God”
is just a pantheistic version of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim God who answers our
prayers and watches over us. Not so. His view of “God” is quite non-personal,
and does not include anything more than what he takes to be the totality of the
natural world. God is best approached through science and philosophy, not
through religious worship and prayer. In fact, he uses the terms “God” and “nature”
interchangeably. His naturalistic view of God-as-nature is most clearly seen in
his position that God is completely determined—with no free will—and does not
act with any purpose. This is precisely what we’d expect a scientist to say
about the natural world. The universe has no free will, and everything within
the universe happens mechanically; God-as-nature has no plan for our lives or
the world in which we live. God does not watch over us, communicate with us,
intervene on our behalf, or bend natural events based on our prayers. The
mechanistic order of the universe is all that there is:

There is no need to show at length that nature has no particular
goal in view, and that final causes are mere human figments. This, I think, is
already evident enough . . . [from the fact] that everything in nature proceeds
from a sort of necessity, and with the utmost perfection. [ibid, Appendix]

The reason why we erroneously think that God acts with a
purpose is that we improperly impose willful purposes on natural events outside
of us. The wind blows a tree over on my crazy neighbor’s house, and I think
that God is punishing him. My farm fields have a good growing season, and I
think that God has answered my prayers and is rewarding me. Since I cannot
guide nature myself, I wrongly conclude that God willfully guides natural
events for my benefit.

What about human beings: do we have free wills
even if God doesn’t? No, Spinoza argues. Since humans are just little pieces of
God-as-nature, our actions are also completely determined: “Nothing in nature
is contingent, but all things are determined to exist and operate in a
particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature” (ibid, 1:29). Again,
we erroneously believe that we have free wills, even when the truth is that we
don’t. The source of this erroneous belief, according to Spinoza, is that we
are conscious only of the fact that we perform actions, but are completely
unaware of our actions’ true underlying causes buried deep within our mental
construction. I am conscious of the fact that I reach out and pick up an apple,
but I have no consciousness at all of the mental machinery that went into me
performing that action. I then mistake the consciousness of my action with free
will, and thus wrongly assume that I picked up the apple from my own free will.
He writes, “experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe
themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and
unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined” (ibid, 3.2).
Spinoza gives several examples of humans who, in special circumstances, clearly
lack free will, yet still believe they act freely:

Thus an infant believes that of its
own free will it desires milk, an angry child believes that it freely desires
vengeance, a timid child believes that it freely desires to run away. Further,
a drunken man believes that he utters from the free decision of his mind words
which, when he is sober, he would willingly have withheld. Thus, too, a
delirious man, a garrulous woman, a child, and others of like complexion,
believe that they speak from the free decision of their mind, when they are in
reality unable to restrain their impulse to talk. [Ethics, 3.2]

In each of the above cases, a
person believes he is freely performing an action, yet from an impartial
perspective we can see that the action is determined by purely mechanical
psychological factors. Spinoza argues that if a falling stone had
consciousness, it might similarly say that it’s falling from its own free will
(“Letter to G.H. Schuller”). All of our actions, then, are completely
determined, in spite of how it seems to us individually from our own perspectives.

For Spinoza, there is a sinister implication to
the fact that human actions are determined by underlying psychological causes:
our emotions can easily take control of our lives and force us to do things
that go against good judgment. We have a fundamental human frailty that makes
it difficult for us to restrain our emotions; he calls this frailty “bondage”
since “when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies
at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing
that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse” (ibid, 4, Preface).
For this reason, people are more easily swayed by emotional appeals than by
true reason, and even genuine knowledge itself has the negative effect of
stirring up conflicts within our minds that lead to every kind of emotion. Thus
if we have any hope of acting reasonably, “it is necessary to know the power
and the infirmity of our nature, before we can determine what reason can do in
restraining the emotions, and what is beyond her power” (ibid, 4.17). Spinoza
is not saying that we can freely choose to restrain our emotions if we try hard
enough. Rather, he says, if we understand how emotions take control of us, that
knowledge itself might help mechanically alter our psychological framework and
thus change how we perform our actions. Our actions will always be determined,
and we will always be inclined to act emotionally. But the more knowledge that
we have about our emotions, the more that this knowledge will automatically induce
us to act more rationally.

Free Speech

Spinoza was a major advocate of free speech, and he had personal
reasons for being so. Well aware of the controversial nature of his pantheistic
view of God-as-nature, he knew that his views could be published during his
life only if there was a political climate of tolerance towards free speech. He
thus composed his Theologico-Politcal Treatise, containing perhaps the
staunchest defense of free speech in its day, hoping it would help foster an
environment of toleration. His general position is that governments should
permit people to freely express their opinions, so long as those opinions do
not lead to subversive and harmful actions. In fact, he argues, a society is
more likely to rebel when its government restricts people to holding only a narrow
and irrational set of beliefs.

He makes six specific claims in defense of free
speech. First, he argues, it “it is impossible to deprive men of
the liberty of saying what they think” (Theologico-Politcal Treatise,
20.71). We have both the power and natural right to be master of our own
thoughts, and, try as we might, it is nearly impossible for us to stay silent
on issues that concern us. Thus, the contents of our minds—our reasons and
judgments—cannot be placed under the control of someone else. This freedom
extends to speaking our minds, and not merely silently reflecting on
controversial ideas within the privacy of our own heads. Even issues as touchy
as proper and improper worship of God fall within the bounds of our liberty of
expression. Second, free speech can be granted for everyone without injuring
governmental authority, so long as people don’t act contrary to the existing
laws. Spinoza recognizes that governmental authority is critical to maintaining
a peaceful society, and we should not act in ways that undermine that
authority. However, he argues, free expression does not undermine the
government’s ability to keep law and order.

Third, free speech can be exercised without
disrupting public peace, and any minor inconvenience that it creates can easily
be remedied. Similar to the previous point, Spinoza concedes that, in the
interests of social peace, we must give up our right to act as we choose.
However, there is no benefit to social peace by giving up free expression. Fourth,
people can exercise free speech without compromising their loyalty to the
government. There is a fear that if people are allowed to speak their minds,
then they would quickly become vocal critics of the government, and worse yet,
express outright disloyalty. Spinoza contends that this worry is unrealistic. Fifth,
laws are entirely useless when they aim to restrict the expression of purely
speculative ideas. Those who love truth, virtue, and knowledge would simply
break those laws while giving preference to their higher ideals. Finally, free
speech is in fact necessary for the preservation of public peace, since death
in the name of freedom is considered a glory:

when people try to
take it away, and bring to trial, not only the acts which alone are capable of
offending, but also the opinions of mankind, they only succeed in surrounding
their victims with an appearance of martyrdom, and raise feelings of pity and
revenge rather than of terror. [ibid, 20.77]

The job of rulers, then, should be confined to controlling
how people behave, and not extend to what people think or say.

D. LEIBNIZ

The final major thinker in the continental rationalist
tradition was German philosopher Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Born
in Leipzig, Leibniz was entrenched in study at quite a young age, possibly
intensified at age 6 by the death of his father--a professor of philosophy at
the University of Leibzig--who inspired a love of learning and left a massive
library, which became accessible to the young boy the next year. In the next
few years, Leibniz taught himself Latin and Greek. By the time he entered the University of Leibzig at age 14, he had also mastered philosophy, theology and law. At the
age of 20, he graduated with degrees in law and philosophy. Ironically, the
University considered his shortfall to be mathematics, although he later
developed calculus. When the University would not assure him a position
teaching law after graduation, Leibniz took his thesis and submitted it to the University of Altdorf instead. In five months time, he had his doctorate in law. His first
job was as an alchemist, a subject he knew nothing about. He spent most of the
rest of his life working for two notable German families, mainly as a political
diplomat. A charming and well-mannered man, Leibniz had friends and admirers
throughout Europe, maintaining correspondence with more than 600 people. But
Leibniz’s reputation was in decline in his last couple of years with disputes
about his claim to inventing calculus independent of Newton. When he died at
age 70, none of his fellow political diplomats attended his funeral. By the
time of his death, he had just one book-length publication, The Theodicy,
but shortly thereafter a steady stream of his unpublished letters and documents
had made their way into print, finally giving him the reputation that he
deserved.

Monads in an Infinitely Divisible Plenum

We’ve seen that one of the characteristics of rationalistic
philosophy is the use of deductive arguments that are modeled after
mathematical proofs. While Leibniz did not push this approach to the extreme
that Spinoza did, he still shared Descartes’ drive for certainty. Leibniz
writes, “Although I am one of those who have done much work on mathematics, I
have constantly meditated on philosophy from my youth up, for it has always
seemed to me that in philosophy there was a way of establishing something solid
by means of clear proofs” (New System). Another distinguishing feature
of rationalist philosophers during the 17th century is that they
constructed elaborate metaphysical systems in their efforts to solve
longstanding philosophical puzzles. Leibniz has the most elaborate of these.
However, underlying its intricacy, his philosophical system is driven by one
key assumption: God maximizes his creative abilities. Everything God performs
as creator is done in the most perfect, desirable, unified, and orderly way
possible. This is evident in creation’s ultra-high level of structural
complexity and also in its perfect goodness. He writes,

God who possesses supreme and
infinite wisdom acts in the most perfect manner not only metaphysically, but
also from the moral standpoint. And with respect to ourselves it can be said
that the more we are enlightened and informed in regard to the works of God the
more will we be disposed to find them excellent and conforming entirely to that
which we might desire. [Discourse, 1]

Sometimes when God maximizes his creative abilities, he opts
for the most complex arrangement of things, which allows him to actualize his
creative powers most fully. And, since God is infinitely powerful, he opts to
create the most infinitely complex world that he can. In some sense, then, God
does not follow Ockham’s razor and its principle of simplicity, which would constrain
his activities.

In developing his system, Leibniz returns to a
pair of issues that preoccupied ancient Greek philosophers 2000 years earlier: whether
there is any vacuum of empty space, and whether matter is infinitely divisible.
Atomists argued that there is indeed empty space, and matter is not infinitely
divisible. The tiniest particles of matter – atoms – cannot be divided into
anything smaller, and they exist within a vacuum of empty space. By contrast,
Anaxagoras took the opposite position on both issues. First, Anaxagoras held
that there is no vacuum of empty space, and thus all area within the cosmos is
packed full of material stuff. That is, there is a plenum—the contrary
of a vacuum. Second, all material stuff within the plenum is infinitely
divisible: it can be divided in half again and again, on to infinity. Leibniz
sides with Anaxagoras on both issues: the universe is an infinitely divisible
plenum. Leibniz’s main argument in defense of the plenum is based on the view
that God maximizes his creative abilities: the more matter there is in the
universe, the better this reflects God’s creativity:

I lay it
down as a principle, that every perfection which God could impart to things
without derogating from their other perfections, has actually been imparted to
them. Now let us fancy a space wholly empty. God could have placed some matter
in it, without derogating in any respect from all other things. Therefore he
has actually placed some matter in that space. Therefore, there is no space
wholly empty. Therefore all is full. [Fourth Letter to Clarke]

The same rationale applies to particles of matter: the more
the better; and in fact, the very best scenario would be a universe filled with
an infinite number of infinitely small substances that are incapable of being
divided at all. He writes, “each portion of matter is not only infinitely
divisible, as the ancients recognized, but is also actually subdivided without
limit, each part into further parts” (Monadology, 65). These infinitely
tiny, indivisible substances he calls monads.

Leibniz’ view of monads faces an immediate
obstacle: if monads themselves are infinitely tiny and each one takes up no
space, how can they jointly unite to make a three-dimensional chunk of matter?
Leibniz’s answer is that monads are sort of like mathematical points. Suppose
that I hold an apple in my hand; within that spherical area there are an
infinite number of mathematical points. While each point itself is infinitely
small and does not itself take up any space, all combined they account for the complete
spherical area of the apple. While monads are not exactly the same thing as
mathematical points, they are what he calls metaphysical points, and can
be understood in a similar way. Each monad is a non-three-dimensional spirit-like
substance, which, like mathematical points, have infinitely tiny exactness within
a three-dimensional area. Unlike mathematical points, however, monads are real
things and have actual substance:

Physical points are indivisible in
appearance only: mathematical points are exact, but they are nothing but
modalities. It is only metaphysical points, or points of substance (constituted
by forms or souls), which are both exact and real; and without them there would
be nothing real, since without true unities there would be no plurality. [The
New System]

Leibniz draws on another conception from ancient Greek
philosophy to help explain how monads—as metaphysical points—have a reality.
They are, he says, “substantial forms.” That is, they are realities like
Plato’s forms that have a spirit-like existence, yet are not composed of
three-dimensional material stuff. However, three-dimensional material things,
like an apple, emerge from the collective unity of the monads within a given
area of space.

Perception, Appetite, and Mirroring in Monads

Granted, then, that the three-dimensional world of material
stuff is composed of infinitely tiny monads. How do monads form things?
Leibniz’s answer is that monads have four special internal abilities that
enable them to congeal together and take on the shape of rocks, trees, people,
and everything else that we see. Those three abilities are perception,
appetite, and mirroring. Consider first the ability of perception: monads
have the ability to perceive what other monads are doing around them. It’s not
a conscious perception, such was when I or my cat are aware of a tree limb
falling in the yard. Instead, it’s more like how an electronic motion detector
might sense things around it without having the ability to mentally reflect on
it. He calls this minimal sensory capacity “minute perception,” and notes that
animals have this as well: “We might perhaps add that brutes have perception,
and that it is not necessary that they should have thought, that is to say,
should have reflection or anything that can be the object of reflection” (New
Essays, 2.9).

The second ability of monads is appetite.
When perceiving what other monads are like around them, they form a desire to
change and shape themselves to fit into the crowd. For example, if one monad
perceives that those around it are taking on the form of a rock, it will then
assume that appearance as well. The monad’s ability to transform itself in many
ways resembles what biologists now tell us about how stem cells work in humans
and animals. When stem cells are placed next to, say, a kidney, they sense
their new location and transform into a kidney cell, thus becoming part of the
kidney.

The third ability of monads is to mirror the
entire universe. Each monad has embedded within it the master plan of everything
that takes place in the universe. The source of this master plan is the
intimate connection that each monad has to those surrounding them; as every
monad is surrounded on all sides by other monads, there is a direct connection
between monads from one end of the universe to the other. He writes,

Because the world is a plenum,
everything is connected and each body acts upon every other body, more or less
according to the distance, and by reaction is itself affected thereby; it
follows that each monad is a mirror, living or endowed with internal activity,
representative according to its point of view of the universe, and as regulated
as the universe itself. [“Principles of Nature and Grace,” 3]

To borrow another analogy from contemporary biology, it is
as though each monad contains the DNA instructions for the layout of the entire
universe.

Thus, through perception, appetite, and mirroring,
each monad knows where it is, what its neighbors are doing, and what it should
do in order to realize the master plan of the universe. And, as the events in
the universe change, the monads themselves will undergo the appropriate change
in appearance to bring this about.

Dominant Monad Souls and Parallalism

According to Leibniz, the monads that form living things
like plants and animals operate slightly differently than those that form non-living
things like rocks. At the heart of all living things, he argues, is a dominant
monad soul that rules over surrounding monads and unifies them a localized organic
structure. He writes,

It is evident, then, that every
living body has a dominating entelechy, which in animals is the soul. The
parts, however, of this living body are full of other living beings, plants and
animals, which, in turn, have each one its entelechy or dominating soul. [“Monadology,”
70]

For example, at the very center of an apple is a dominant
monad that signals to surrounding ones that they must take the shape of an
apple. Thus, by unifying together surrounding monads, it transforms them into
one machine and directs their operations. As time progresses and the apple slowly
rots, each monad making up the apple will be going through a change in
appetite, thereby progressively displaying a rotten appearance. When we move on
to animals, there is a dominant monad which can do more than simply perceive:
it has sentience, which means that it can feel, be aware of things, and have
memory. This monad is the animal’s soul.

Moving on further to human beings, as with
animals, the dominant monad within me arranges the rest of the monads within me
to form my body, and it gives me sentience. Added to this, though, the dominant
monad in me contains the added ability to reason; this gives me my mind, or
“rational soul.” Like Descartes and the other rationalists, Leibniz is a
spirit-body dualist: human beings are composed of both a physical body and a
non-physical soul. For Leibniz, my nonphysical soul is the dominant monad
within me that gives me sentience and rationality; my physical body, by
contrast, is composed of non-dominant monads, which band together under the
direction of my dominant monad soul. As a spirit-body dualist, Leibniz faces
the same problem as did the other rationalists. That is, since our minds are
non-three-dimensional spirit, and our bodies are three-dimensional matter, how
does sensory information move back and forth between the spirit and physical realms?
Leibniz solves the problem with his own unique version of parallelism.

As we’ve seen with Spinoza, parallelism is the
theory that a person’s physical body and spirit-mind exist in completely
separate realms, but events in each realm magically unfold in perfect
synchronization with each other; thus, there is no need for my physical body
and spirit-mind to directly communicate and interact with each other. In
Spinoza’s case, the two realms are synchronized since they are both part of
God’s pantheistic identity. Leibniz is no pantheist, though, and his rationale
is different: the mind-spirit and body operate in perfect synchronization like
two clocks that are in perfect agreement; they are both part of God’s perfect
master plan and thus stay in synchronization. He writes,

Imagine two clocks or watches which
agree perfectly . . . . [as when we] construct these two clocks with so much
art and accuracy as to assure their future agreement. Put now the soul and the
body in place of these two clocks; their agreement . . . . [will be best
explained by] the way of pre-established harmony. From the beginning God has
made each of these two substances of such a nature that merely by following its
own peculiar laws, received with its being, it nevertheless accords with the
other. It is just as if there were a mutual influence or as if God always put
his hand thereto in addition to his general cooperation. [“The New System,”
Postscript, 1696]

While it appears that my body and soul are interacting with
each other—shuttling sensory information back and forth, they are not. Instead,
they are operating in perfect synchronization where “the soul follows its own laws, and the
body likewise follows its own laws” (“Monadology,” 78). Suppose that a bee
lands on my arm and I swat it away. According to Leibniz, the laws of nature
that govern the physical realm bring it about that a physical bee lands on my
physical arm, and my physical hand swats it off. At the same time, though, laws
governing the spirit-realm bring it about that I mentally perceive the
sensation of a bee, and then make a willful decision to swat it off my arm. The
laws the two realms and everything that unfolds in each are in perfect
synchronization because God has designed the world that way as part of his
great master plan – or “pre-established harmony” as Leibniz calls it.

Evil and the Best of All Possible Worlds

The most famous part of Leibniz’s philosophy is that which
deals with the problem of evil, that is, the potential conflict between human
suffering on the one hand and God’s goodness on the other. Consider, for
example, the immeasurable suffering caused by Hitler in his efforts to
exterminate the Jews and dominate the world. If God is good, why would he have
allowed this to happen? In a nutshell, Leibniz’s solution is that God has
created the best possible world, and even the evils that we see are so
integrated into God’s larger master plan, that, on balance, they actually
contribute to making the world a better place than it would otherwise be.

The first step in this solution is to show that
God creates only the best possible world. Imagine that at the outset of
creation God had before him the blueprints of countless possible worlds that he
might create. He examines them one at a time to see which is the best and
deserving of creating. One possible world, for example, consists of only one
brick that floats around in outer space. Another possible world has stars and
planets, just like ours, but contains no living things. Yet another is like the
previous one but includes plants and animals; however, it contains no human
beings. And then there are all the possible worlds that contain humans. In some
of these worlds Hitler exists, and in others he doesn’t. God then makes his
choice: his wisdom tells him which is the best of these possible worlds, his
goodness has him choose it, and his power has him create it. He writes,

Now as there are an infinity of possible universes in the ideas of
God, and but only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for
the choice of God which determines him to select one rather than another.

And this reason is to be found only in the fitness or
in the degree of perfection which these worlds possess, each possible thing
having the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection which it
involves.

This is the cause for the existence of the greatest
good; namely, that the wisdom of God permits him to know it, his goodness
causes him to choose it, and his power enables him to produce it. [“Monadology,”
53-55]

According to the above, each possible world contains a
specific degree of perfection, and God simply singles out the one that has the
most.

The second step in Leibniz’s solution is to understand
how the evil that exists in this most perfect world is naturally balanced
through punishment. Just as there is a pre-existing harmony between realms of
the body and soul, there is a similar harmony between the natural world and
moral world. Thus, if I commit some evil, I can count on being punished through
some natural phenomenon, such as a disease or natural disaster. Similarly, if I
perform a good act, I can count on nature rewarding me, such as through good
health or good weather. He writes,

We can say also that God, the Architect, satisfies in all respects
God the Law Giver, that therefore sins will bring their own penalty with them
through the order of nature, and because of the very structure of things,
mechanical though it is. And in the same way the good actions will attain their
rewards in mechanical way through their relation to bodies, although this
cannot and ought not always to take place without delay. [Ibid, 89]

Thus, whenever I experience suffering, my first recourse is
to consider whether I’ve committed some evil for which I am being punished.

The third step in Leibniz solution is to
understand how enormous evils, such as those perpetrated by Hitler, are part of
God’s master plan in this best of all possible worlds. If God is all powerful,
it seems that it was within his ability to create a world without such enormous
evils. Leibniz responds with a classic answer given by Augustine and others,
that is, sometimes evil is necessary to bring about a greater good:

The best course is not always that
one which tends towards avoiding evil, since it is possible that the evil may
be accompanied by a greater good. For example, the general of an army will
prefer a great victory with a slight wound to a state of affairs without wound
and without victory. [Theodicy, Summary]

For example, while the fall of Adam brought about enormous
evil, it also had the positive benefit of leading to the incarnation of God through
Jesus, which “gave to the universe something nobler than anything there would
otherwise have been” (ibid). Further, he argues, a world with free creatures
who commit evil is better than a world without free creatures. Human free
choice is clearly the ultimate source of all evil and suffering, and it would
certainly be within God’s power to intervene to stop the evil. For example, God
could have dropped a bolder on Hitler’s head when Hitler decided to give up
being an artist and go into politics instead. However, Leibniz argues, there is
no moral requirement for God to intervene in such dramatic ways, when he can
counterbalance such evil through more natural means:

It was consistent with order and
the general good for God to grant to certain of his creatures the opportunity
to exercise their freedom, even when he foresaw that they would turn to evil:
for God could easily correct the evil, and it was not fitting that in order to
prevent sin he should always act in an extraordinary way. [Ibid]

Thus, a world with evil may be better than a world without
evil. Ultimately, Leibniz argues, we may never have an entirely satisfying
answer since we are unable to comprehend the totality of God’s plan, and, thus,
we need to simply trust that this is the best of all possible worlds, in spite
of how it might appear to us at the moment.

Questions for
Review

Please answer
all of the following questions for review.

1. What are
Descartes four rules of scientific method?

2. What is
Descartes’ evil genius hypotheses, and what kind of beliefs does that
hypothesis call into question?

3. What is
Descartes’ point when he says “I think, therefore I am”?

4. According to
Descartes, what is the function of clarity and distinctness mechanism?

5. According to
Descartes, how does sensory information in my physical body interact with my
conscious non-physical spirit-mind?

6. According to
Malebranche’s theory of viewing all things in God, how do our spirit-minds receive
sensory data about physical world?

7. According to
Malebranche’s theory of occasionalism, how do conscious decisions in our
spirit-minds cause physical actions in our bodies?

8. What is
Malebranche’s view of extreme occasionalism?

9. What is
Malebranche’s solution to the problem of evil, particularly regarding suffering
caused through nature?

10. According to
Spinoza, what are the two main attributes of God?

11. According to
Spinoza’s theory of parallelism, how is sensory information in our physical
bodies coordinated with conscious through in our spirit-minds?

12. Why according
to Spinoza, do we wrongly assume that humans have free will?

13. What is
Spinoza’s general view on the subject of free speech?

14. According to Leibniz,
what are the three main abilities of monads?

15. According to
Leibniz’s theory of parallelism, how is sensory information in our physical
bodies coordinated with conscious through in our spirit-minds?

16. What is
Leibniz solution to the problem of evil?

Questions for
Analysis

Please select
only one question for analysis from those below and answer it.

1. Descartes’
system of knowledge is built upon the foundational assertion of one’s
existence. From that he deduces things like God’s existence, the reliability of
the clarity and distinctness mechanism, and the existence of the external world.
What is the weakest link in the chain of truths that he deducts, and why?

2. Malebranche
and Leibniz both offered solutions to the problem of evil; which of these has
the better solution and why?

3. Compare
Spinoza’s notion of God as nature with the traditional notion of the theistic
God (i.e., an all powerful, all knowing, all good God who is conscious and
exists independently of the created world).

4. Explain
Spinoza argument that humans have no free will and say whether or not you
agree.

5. Leibniz argues
that monads to not take up space, yet they cumulatively create three
dimensional space. Explain whether or not this is possible.

6. All four
philosophers in this chapter give God a prominent role in their systems. Which
of these conceptions of God best fits with the traditional notion of the
theistic God, and why?

7. All four
philosophers in this chapter offered solutions to the mind-body problem, that
is, how sensory information moves back and forth between our physical bodies
and our spirit-minds. Do any of these seem more plausible than others? If none
are plausible, can you think of a better solution?